Little Robots

Yale Opera is putting on a production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Shubert Theater from Feb. 16 to 18. The music will be unchanged. It will be sung in the original German. It’s just that almost everyone in the cast will be robots.

Last year, when Yale Rep plucked the composer’s Assassins from mothballs, audiences couldn’t help but feel a contemporary edge to the 1990 musical, considering the political hostility of the moment and that show features figures remembered in infamy. Indeed, during a talk by Sondheim at the theater shortly before opening, an audience member remarked that the timing of the musical’s re-staging seemed eerie. It was a touchy moment, but Sondheim handled it well, taking a deep breath, before defusing the topic.

In the opening scene of Field Guide — at the Yale Repertory Theatre now until Feb. 17 — a young woman delivers a series of awkward jokes in a standup routine that is more of a meta routine. Among the “jokes” is the announcement that she owns no property and is about to lose both her health insurance and her income stream.

In light of this revelation, her mock standup, and much of the performance that follows it, resembles an exercise in playful cynicism. Hannah speaks for a generation that has become adult in an America uninterested in protecting its former children, for whom an adaptive strategy is to hurl droll comedy into the void.

Passion, the musical by Stephen Sondheim with book by James Lapine, has the distinction of having had the shortest Broadway run of any Tony-winning musical. It’s been seen as Sondheim’s most personal piece, and, in the view of third-year director Rory Pelsue, who is directing a production as his thesis show at Yale School of Drama, the work is “utterly unique.” It evokes the Gothic and the Romantic, both with capital letters, and “can make you feel alive in a cynical, dissolute time.”

Office Hour opens with a short scene that primes the audience to anticipate a terrifying event — a shooting at a university — and then delays that event as long as possible. In playwright Julia Cho’s astute hands, though, that delay becomes the point: It is the trauma we bring to the play, not the fear it invents, that she is asking us to examine.

The scene: At a regional theater, a sexual misconduct scandal has just exploded. The artistic director, handsy and foul-mouthed, has exited the stage for good, and the steady, behind-the-scenes manager finds himself trying to hold up his life’s passion from the fallout. As the curtain rises, all the stage’s lights shine on one man, emerging from the wings, stepping, deliberately, toward the expectant audience.

Long Wharf Theatre produces a lot of social-issues dramas like that on its stages. On Wednesday the drama was playing out in real life on Sargent Drive, as Joshua Borenstein stepped into the spotlight. It was time to draw on all he’d been learning.